Well, in years past I had an MSDN subscription that was invaluably useful. Having parted way with the former employers who had provided a subscription as part of the normal developer suite, I found I was missing it. So I talked to the account manager at work and she got a quote for me with CDW using the company discount, same as they would do for one of the companies we do IT support for, just no pricing markup. So I forked over my Visa card, and a couple of hours later I got a welcome to Open License program email. So I went out to the Volume Licensing Service Center as per instructions and tie my windows live ID to the email address associated with the agreement #.
I kept going in circles. I'd be sitting on the MSDN license details and click the Manage MSDN Subscriptions link. The first two days I kept being taken back to the main summary screen. I figured that something must have to process through the system so I gave it a few days. I got back into the office a few days later and kept trying from my work system. I finally started getting taken to a windows live redirect and ultimately got dropped on the manage benefits screen - but was greeted by "An internal error has occurred. Please contact system administrator".
So I got on the phone with CDW, not knowing if this was because something wasn't entered into my profile correctly or what. In the meanwhile, I also discovered that because of the invoice layout and their "screen scraping" for data entry, my name got put into the middle of the street address for my contact info and our account manager's name got put into the account as the contact person and account owner, but listed my email. CDW told me it all had to go to Microsoft and they gave me a phone number.
I got hold of Microsoft. They took down my information and told me to send them screen prints and that CDW would have to update the account holder info since they entered it. They gave me an incident number and that was that. I took some screenshots and emailed them in with the incident number I had been given. They emailed back the next day and gave me a new incident number.
Another day went by and I got an email back:
We are contacting you to verify the resolution of Case ID 771XXXX regarding your MSDN issue. Our Technical Support Team investigated your issue and informed us that your account is showing no errors in the system and you may be experiencing the issue due to your internet browser or network settings. Please ensure you are using Internet Explorer 8, clear your cache and cookies, and try again.If your issue still persists, please try to access your MSDN benefit on another network (such as your home network).
So I wrote them back, I had tried from four different Windows 7 systems from three different locations and always got the same results. I also called in to follow up. They gave me a song and dance about how there was no issue in my account and that I should try another system. I referred them to the original ticket number and said that these steps had been done already and had not resolved the issue. Guess what, they had already closed both tickets, rather than at least waiting a day or two to see if I got back with them. They then said they would escalate the issue to the next level support and that they would have the next level support call me.
Three days later (and nearly two weeks since I got the welcome message), they still haven't called me and I still can't get into my MSDN Premium subscription that I paid quite a bit of money for. CDW also has not gotten the profile updated, and I've been working with the account manager our company uses for most all CDW purchases, and he is befuddled by this - he says they sell these Open License editions of MSDN all the time.
So right now I'm left with an Open License Premium MSDN that I can't get into and that has an agreement owner that has my email address and my name appears as the street address, but the name of the person who actually placed the order for me as the name of the Open License owner...
GRRRR!!!!